


the fact that life will be dark

by piggy09



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-03
Updated: 2019-06-03
Packaged: 2020-04-06 23:12:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19072621
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: Nott and Yasha take watch and talk about compulsory heterosexuality.





	the fact that life will be dark

Yasha is dreaming that they are in the Barbed Fields, and they are on the moorbounders, and she has her face buried in Caduceus’ shoulder: moss and decay. They’ve been riding for months and they’re going to keep riding forever and if she clutches Caduceus long enough his form softens, falls to pieces – and the small-flower smell of Zuala’s hair—

And she comes to consciousness suddenly, one hand already reaching for her sword. Beau’s rough warm hand on her shoulder. “Do _not_ stab me,” Beau hisses. “Yasha, come on, be cool, it’s your turn for watch.”

“Right,” Yasha says. “Right. Sorry. I’m awake.” She sits up, touches a hand to her hair to check the state of the braids – disheveled, but there. She gingerly untangles herself from the lump of Caleb-and-Caduceus that she’s drifted into, and takes Beau’s hand to pull herself up to standing.

“Anything?” she asks, watching Jester wake Nott up across the bubble.

“Nah,” Beau says. “Jester said she saw one of those gorilla-looking motherfuckers, but I think she was just bored.”

“I’ll keep an eye out.” Yasha steps around her sleeping (living) friends and moves towards the makeshift sentry’s outpost at the edge of the bubble. She lowers herself into Beau’s seat – still warm – and folds her arms over her knees. Outside, the wind exhales itself soft and wet over the ground.

“Hey,” croaks Nott, sitting down next to her. “Jester says she saw one of those—”

“—gorilla-looking motherfuckers, I know,” Yasha says. “Beau thinks she was joking, but just in case I think we should be quiet. They aren’t very friendly.”

“Yeah,” Nott says. “I bet you could take ‘em, though, Orphanmaker. Orphan- _maker_. You’re so cool, you could murder a giant spider gorilla, no problem.” She fidgets for her flask, takes a big gulp of it, offers it sideways to Yasha. The smell from the open mouth is of dark water: cold, deep, metallic, stale. Yasha shakes her head.

“More for me,” Nott mutters cheerfully, and takes a few more hearty gulps. “This stuff is such shit.”

“You could stop drinking it, maybe.”

“Yeah,” Nott says, “no. Maybe later.” She screws the top back on. Yasha watches her nimble fingers on the top of the flask and then goes back to watching the surrounding terrain. The cloudcover is too thick for stars, which is simultaneously comforting and painful.

“That’s a cool name, by the way,” Nott says. “Orphanmaker. Did I say that already? It’s super cool. I bet your wife was so into it, do you think I should get a cool nickname? I’m not an Orphanmaker but I did kill that baby manticore once, so, Babykiller maybe. What do you think, is that good?”

“Nott,” Yasha says, “don’t you have a son?”

“Yeah, but he isn’t a baby.” Nott screws the lid back on her flask and then unscrews it again and then screws it back on and unscrews it again and “He’s very old now. Ten, I think. Maybe seven. Ask me when I’m sober, I guess!”

She’s very twitchy, but she is always very twitchy. Should Yasha – no, that would be – she should wake Caleb up, but Caleb needs sleep, he is always so tired. Instead she carefully puts her large terrible hand over Nott’s small and spiky one. She says: “Are you okay?”

“Why would I not be okay,” Nott says, shrilly. “Just because I’m drinking again? That just makes me better! Sharper! Faster! Sneak—” and she abruptly loses interest. Her ears droop. She darts a look over her shoulder at the sleeping party – at Caleb’s sleeping face – and then looks back at Yasha. Then away again. Yasha dutifully checks their surroundings: empty of life, as far as she can tell with her shit perception.

“Do you want to talk about it?” she says.

“Not really, no.” Nott lets out a frustrated growl-sigh and drops her flask, pulls her hand away from Yasha’s, and scrubs both hands over her face. “Maybe? Ugh! I don’t know, this is so stupid. Yasha if you tell anyone about this I will shoot you! Again! On purpose this time!”

“Tell anyone about wha—”

“I don’t think I love my husband,” Nott says. “Aaah. Ah. Okay. There we go. Now it’s all out in the open.” She scrabbles for her flask and chugs it, downing her weight in subpar magical alcohol. She offers the flask to Yasha again, insistently; Yasha gently pushes it away.

“What do you mean, you don’t love your husband?”

Nott exhales through her teeth, drums her fingers on the flask; the noise is like rain on a tin roof. She darts a nervous look at Beau – snoring, loudly, the rumble of low thunder in her chest – and then looks back at Yasha. One of her ears flick. “I love him,” she says stubbornly. “I mean – of course I love him! I only…well…I didn’t really – no one would have wanted me anyways! So I…hm.” She folds her knees up to her chest and mirrors Yasha’s posture; it looks very silly on her, since she’s so small, since she’s so small and so sharp.

“So you love him,” Yasha says, “but you don’t know if it’s because you love him, or because you love the way he loves you?”

Nott mutters something into her folded arms. Her gold eyes flick up to Yasha’s, and when Yasha doesn’t do anything Nott slams her hands down into the ground and screeches: “ _I think I’m gay!_ ”

The sound reverberates through the bubble; Beau starts awake with a jerk, sitting up and making intense and glazed eye contact with Yasha. She says: “Hubble…bwuh?”

“Go back to sleep,” Yasha hisses. “It was – uh – it was a coyote.”

“Y’have coyotes?” Beau says muzzily, but she’s already slumping back down to resume her snoring. Around her the Mighty Nein are in various stages of half-wakefulness, and after Nott and Yasha hold their breaths for a second they all go right back to sleep again. Mostly, Yasha’s discovered, they can all sleep through anything if there isn’t an immediate threat of violence.

“Okay,” Yasha says, in the ensuing snoring silence. “Uh. Jeez. Wow.”

“What do you mean, _jeez_ ,” Nott hisses. “Aren’t you an expert on this?! You – _seduced_ Beau two seconds after meeting her—”

“Wait, hold on, I don’t really think that I—”

“—and you had a _wife_ , that’s about as gay as you can possibly be! So?!”

“So _what_ , Nott,” Yasha says.

“I don’t know,” Nott says. “I don’t know.” She picks up a rock from the ground and throws it back down on the ground.

“Okay,” Yasha says. She leans back on her hands. “Why do you think you’re gay?”

“I always – I always knew that other girls were pretty,” Nott says, “and I knew that I wasn’t, but I thought that was just – I thought that was normal! I thought that pretty girls made your heart flutter because of – I don’t know, jealousy? I thought I would feel things for boys _eventually_ , and if I didn’t that’s just because I was – Veth, who can’t do anything right. And then I had a husband! And a _son_ , I couldn’t – I didn’t even know you could, you could _be_ gay until I joined the party and then it was – well, you’ve seen everyone, Jester is like a princess and you, you’re so strong and – well, Beau. Don’t tell Beau, she would be _insufferable_ if she knew, that, you know. That I—

“So,” she says, “what do I do about it? Yeza – he _loves_ me, and, and I love him, and we came all the way here to get him, and I don’t want to tell everyone that in case you’re all mad at me, you know, _she_ dragged us to _Xhorhas_ to get her _husband_ and now she’s a _lesbian_ so…why, why even keep her around?” Her voice is quiet on that last part and Yasha gives into the impulse, finally: she scoots closer and slings her arm over Nott’s shoulders. Nott is so small that it’s like holding a baby ( _Orphanmaker_ but, no, not now, she can’t—) and Yasha does it gently.

“Nobody here would ever do that,” she says. “We’re a family. We – we support each other. No matter what. Okay?”

“God,” Nott mutters, “you’re so _ripped_ , you’re like a very buff goddess.” She tentatively curls closer to Yasha’s side. “They would support _you_ no matter what,” she says, voice muffled. “You’re very nice, and – and strong, and good in a fight. No matter how many people you may or may not have murdered.”

“Thanks?” Yasha says.

“Yeah,” Nott says, in a small and sullen murmur.

“They’d support you too, you know,” Yasha says. “We all would. When you told us how you were Veth, before, we all wanted to be here for you and support you because you are family and we care about you. It would be – I think it would be the same, if you wanted to share anything else.

“If you aren’t ready to share it, though,” Yasha says, “that’s okay. I can keep it a secret, if you want.”

“We don’t really have time for it,” Nott says. “It’s – it’s easier, if I keep making jokes about the rhino sex juice and how much I want to get back to my husband and all of that shit. This is all such a mess, we don’t need this too.”

“I don’t know if that’s true, but okay.”

Slowly, Yasha feels the tiny prickles of Nott’s claws clutching at her shirt. “I really do love him,” Nott murmurs. “I love his face and how excited he gets about alchemy, I love working with him, I love his _razor-sharp intellect_ and stuff, I just…I don’t…I think about going home with him, the way I’m supposed to want, and I just get so _panicked_. I want him to be safe and I want Luke to be safe but I want them to go be safe with Jester’s mom somewhere where I don’t have to think about them or worry about them, they can just be safe and happy and I can be – I – I just keep thinking about you and Zuala, and how you were married, and how nice it would be, to be – to be married to a lady, and then you could kiss her whenever you want, and…this is very cruel, isn’t it. Because of – everything. I’m sorry, Yasha.”

Yasha lets out a slow breath. “It was very nice, actually,” she says. “Kissing her whenever I wanted to. Her hair, you know, it smelled like…flowers. The little white and yellow ones, I don’t know their names. Kissing her was nice.”

“I’m sorry you lost her.”

“Yeah,” Yasha says. “Yeah. Me too.”

Nott’s ear flicks against Yasha’s arm. “So we’re…okay?” Nott says. “Even though I shot you a bunch of times – on accident! – and also just totally freaked out at you about your dead wife and how I’m, uh, well, more of a fan of the… _fairer sex?_ Maybe?”

“Of course we’re cool,” Yasha says. “I mean, it hurt a lot when you shot me a bunch of times. But I’m all healed up now, so – so, yeah, I mean, of course we’re cool. And I…I don’t know how much help I can be, with being gay and everything, since I was only ever with one person, but – you don’t have to do this alone. It doesn’t matter what it is that you’re doing, you won’t be alone.”

Nott doesn’t say anything. Yasha rubs her hand up and down Nott’s back, soothingly, and ignores the little raindrops Nott is leaving on Yasha’s stomach.

“Great,” Nott says, her voice wobbling. “That’s really – very cool of you. I think I might keep drinking though? A lot? Just until I – figure this whole thing out, a little bit.”

“If you need to,” Yasha says. “If that’s what you need.”

“It’s what I need,” Nott says, but she doesn’t make a move towards the flask; she just huddles against Yasha’s side, kneading at Yasha like a cat. Yasha keeps on holding on to Nott’s frail shoulders. Both of them wait for the sun to start rising.

**Author's Note:**

> I don't feel adequate  
> Thinking I'm a monster in disguise
> 
> I'll do this my way  
> Don't matter if I break  
> I gotta be on my own  
> \--"Gravel to Tempo," Hayley Kiyoko
> 
> Thanks for reading! Please kudos + comment if you enjoyed! :)


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